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NX Compression Technology To Go Closed Source
An anonymous reader writes "NoMachine has sneakily revealed it is closing its source of the NX compression technology with NX 4.0: 'This release marks an important milestone in the history of the company. Version 4.0 of the software, in fact, will be only available under a closed source license.'"
It should be possible to make Wayland "network transparent". This would be the job of the "compositor". The Compositor takes the window images and assembles them into the screen display, and also takes user interface events and sends them to the programs. There is no reason it cannot assemble a window onto a remote display by talking to the Compositor running there, and return input events from that remote display. It can take hints about what areas of the windows were updated and doing comparisons and data compression so the images are sent quickly.
This is how Microsoft does remove windowing and it works reasonably well. Also how VNC works though they don't have access to the low levels similar to the Compositor.
One of the antecedents of NX was a thing called "dxpc", which I used to use. It did compression, but more performance came from simply being a proxy and short-circuiting many of the round-trip communications X did. X is a very chatty protocol, and much of that chatter can be intelligently done away with. That's one of the things that dxpc, and now NX did.
A year or two back I found dxpc source, dusted it off, and it actually built cleanly. But it didn't work worth spit. I guess X has moved on.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
VNC opens a window that everything else goes in.
Running shit via "ssh -X [-Y]" makes anything I run integrate seamlessly into my environment.
Big difference, that.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I've never seen NX perform as well as VNC - espescially Turbo/Tiger VNC with VirtualGL.
If you're doing remote 3D/scientific visualization, Turbo/Tiger VNC and VirtualGL is far and away better than NX. I've gotten 20 fps for 1280x1024 3D graphics -- over a 2 Mbit connection. VirtualGL/TurboVNC can also handle clusters of GPU's (ie. many nodes, each rendering part of an extremely complex image). The final screen buffer is then tunneled over SSH. It's amazing, frankly, to have some-odd 16 or so GPU's rendering a hellaciously complex 3D scene, and then it gets sent over a tiny pipe using TurboVNC & VirtualGL, and is then displayed on a netbook with very usable frame rates.
I didn't believe it was possible until I tried it myself. Recall you can stream a movie at close to DVD quality at 2 MBit; so I guess it's not that unbelieveable after all.
NX, in comparison, couldn't even start glxgears.
you don't need any special ports open, just SSH
SSH is all you need for anything. It's port forwarding and tunneling capabilities can be used for anything that uses TCP/IP - NFS, VNC, Samba, HTTP, video games - anything.
NX does the same thing - it uses SSH port forwarding & tunneling; it just handles it transparently for the user.
This is hardly unique to NX, as many VNC implementations also uses SSH transparently for the user.
And it's been pointed out - there isn't a major platform that VNC doesn't support.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.